All Posts in Leadership

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Why is tension between IT and business executives so common?

No less an authority than Dr. Richard Paley, teacher of Divinity and Theobiology, Fellowship University reveals the answer (http://objectiveministries.tripod.com/propaganda.html):

“The real operating system hiding under the newest version of the Macintosh … (MacOS X) is called … Darwin! That’s right, new Macs are based on Darwinism! While they currently don’t advertise this fact to consumers, it is well known among the computer elite, who are mostly Atheists and Pagans. Furthermore, the Darwin OS is released under an “Open Source” license, which is just another name for Communism. … the truth has finally come out: Apple Computers promote (sic) Godless Darwinism and Communism.”

Our secret, I’m afraid, is out: We all believe in either no gods at all or lots of them. Is it any wonder we’re closely watched by the god-fearing, non-Darwinian capitalists who run the show?

Believe it or not, Dr. Paley has something even more useful to teach than the source of IT/business tension.

As a leader, two of your most important responsibilities are making good decisions and persuading those you lead to embrace them.

The evident success of Dr. Paley and his ilk demonstrates an important principle: Given a choice between a complex, difficult-to-understand, disconcerting explanation and a simplistic, comforting one, many prefer simplistic comfort if it’s remotely plausible, especially if it involves blaming someone else for their problems.

Making good decisions requires that you recognize and eschew simplistic, comforting explanations. Even the best decision-makers constantly guard against this very natural tendency. That’s one, obvious lesson to learn. The other?

Persuasion is difficult, especially when you have to present a hard, painful choice. The easiest method is pandering to your audience with a simplistic, comforting explanation that blames someone else (“clueless managers who just don’t get it” would be a common example among IT professionals). Don’t write this off too quickly: It has the advantage of working, nearly every time.

It is, however, manipulative and dishonest. That doesn’t mean the right approach is to present your logic in cool, painstaking detail.

To persuade, keep your arguments simple if not simplistic, and phrase them in terms relevant to your audience if you can’t make them comforting.

There is, after all, a difference between pandering to your audience and caring about it.

Comments

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Maybe it’s just semantics.

A bunch of readers commented on my recent column asserting that CIOs and CTOs should spend most of their energy dealing with strategic and tactical matters, delegating infrastructure, (which I equated to the military concept of logistics), to others.

Among the comments: “Amateurs talk strategy, professionals discuss logistics.” This correspondent, along with quite a few others, mentioned a number of examples in which bad logistics lost battles. I agree: Bad logistics can lose battles, as when the Spanish Armada literally ran out of ammunition fighting the British fleet, which was able to re-supply since the entire engagement was fought in the English Channel. But this misses the point. Of course bad logistics can lose battles. That doesn’t mean great logistics can win them.

The lesson for you: Bad infrastructure can make even the best applications unavailable. Great infrastructure is invisible. Do you want to be invisible unless there’s a problem? I didn’t think so. Delegate infrastructure; focus your attention on strategy and tactics.

Or maybe on “Operations” in its military sense. IS Survivalist Ralph Hitchens informs me that military theorists have added this as a fourth level of military planning.

Above it all is the non-military concept of “policy.” “We’re going to stamp out terrorism,” is an example — a national goal which military action can help advance. “Strategy” determines the overall objectives of military action and identifies the major campaigns that should be fought to achieve them so as to help achieve policy. “Operations” decides which battles to fight and how to deploy forces to fight them to win campaigns.

Organizing business change has significant similarities. Enterprise-scale change corresponds to the strategic level of planning. Call the organized effort of achieving strategic change a “program.” Since “operations” would inevitably be confused with running a data center, let’s call the next-lower level of change “business outcomes” and call the organized effort of achieving them “initiatives.”

Then there’s tactics — the specific plan of action military officers create to win battles. What might that correspond to in IT terms?

Tactics corresponds to projects, in more ways than one. In terms of military action, it’s hard to be sure if you’re really achieving your strategy, or even if you’re attaining your operational goals. Likewise in business. Whether the topic is combat or project management, you can be very sure if you’ve won the battle.

It’s up to someone else to win the war.

Comments